Tomás F. Summers Sandoval, a Pomona College joint professor of
History and Chicano/Latino Studies, is now the first Faculty
Coordinator for the Draper Center for Community Partnerships.

The
Draper Center, inaugurated in October following the receipt of an
endowment from alumnus Ranney Draper PO ’60 and his family, helps
connect students with community service opportunities. In his new role,
Summers Sandoval will work directly with faculty to integrate
service-learning projects into classrooms.

“My job is to help
foster a discussion about the possibilities of service learning,”
Summers Sandoval said. “We’re trying to connect faculty to the kinds of
resources they need to design community engagement opportunities for
their students.”

Summers Sandoval came to Pomona in 2006 from
California State University at Monterey Bay. “We’re really excited to
be adding Tomás as Faculty Coordinator,” said Maria Tucker, Director of
the Draper Center. “I feel like he has a really good sense of the
meaningfulness of community work within the context of higher
education.”

Summers Sandoval said he sees the position as an opportunity to expand the initiatives he has long advocated as a professor.

“I’ve been working on linkages between higher education and local communities for my entire professional career,” he said.

For
the past 15 years, Summers Sandoval has worked on issues of community outreach in varied capacities, including working on service-learning curricular deelopment and relaed policies at his previous job.

“Students
[should] learn about the real world, outside of books,” Summers
Sandoval said. “It’s about civics: learning what it means to be a
responsible, educated citizen in the world.”

Summers Sandoval will work mostly with faculty, but his role will “revolve around students as well,” he said.

“The
Draper Center aims to create academically grounded opportunities for
students to experience mutually beneficial exchange with community
members and organizations....As opposed to the old model of
volunteerism and charity,” he said.

While the Faculty
Coordinator position is a new position, the classroom-community
relationships it aims to foster have been around for some time. Many
professors, including politics professsor Rick Worthington, sociology
and Chicano/Latino studies professor Gilda Ochoa, mathematics professor
Ami Radunskaya, and environmental analysis professor Char Miller, have
taught courses that have community components to them, Summers Sandoval
said.

“This is, in a lot of ways, the culmination of their
work,” he said, referring to the inauguration of the Draper Center last
fall.

In his new position, Summers Sandoval hopes to maintain
the breadth of community-concious professors from a variety of
disciplines.

“Often the most dynamic examples of service
learning or applied, course-based community engagement are from the
sciences, mathematics, or just about any discipline you can imagine,”
Summers Sandoval said.

Coming from the academic world, Summers Sandoval brings a new perspective to the Draper Center, Tucker said.

“He looks at this with a different lens,” she said.

One
of the Faculty Coordinator’s tasks, Tucker said, will be to help
identify courses that currently feature a community-based component and compile
them for students in an accessible way. Summers Sandoval will work with
others in the Draper Center to create independent studies with service
learning features, and a proposal is also in place to find ways to assign credit for the kinds of work students would do as part of community engagement, course-based learning.

Summers Sandoval is quickly getting to work. The
Draper Center will host faculty seminars over the next few weeks to
discuss the idea of having a special designation for courses that
utilize community engagement opportunities.

When asked about the
required service programs some colleges have implemented, such as those
of Tulane University, Summers Sandoval said he would love to “start
having that conversation,” but said Pomona is not at that stage yet.

“It’s
a cart before the horse kind of thing,” Summers Sandoval said. “What we
are working on now is getting the foundation set and asking ourselves,
‘What is course-based community service? What does it mean for
professors, students, and the campus?’”

As Faculty Coordinator,
Summers Sandoval hopes to stimulate this kind of dialogue and to bring
together members of the college community and local community.

“We
come to this table as something of equals, and that’s the way service
learning ideally happens,” Summers Sandoval said. “It’s an opportunity
for both sides to gain.”

Editor's note: This article was originally published on February 18, 2010, byThe Student Life.